|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Keeping the Faith: White Civil Rights and Black Affirmative Action
| Article
# : |
19858 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
8,412 Words |
| Author
: |
Bernard W. Bell
Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. His latest book is The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition (1987). |
Is the American Constitution really color blind? Or has it historically been interpreted as affirming "separate but equal" rights for whites and blacks? As our nation begins to celebrate the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, the adoption in 1791 of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and as the Congress reintroduces the Civil Rights Bill of 1990 (which was vetoed by President Bush), I and many Americans of African descent look back anew at the differences between white civil rights and black affirmative action. We also look back to the lessons of our ancestors. They teach us, as James Baldwin writes in The Price of the Ticket (1985), that "it is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: In the face of one's victim, one sees oneself." They teach us to keep our hands on the plow and our eyes on the prize of freedom with justice and equality. They teach us to keep the faith.
But how long should blacks wait for whites to reconcile the color-blind principle of civil rights they preach with the white power and privilege that they unjustly perpetuate? Since the contradictory sanctioning of white freedom and black slavery in the Constitution and the promotion of the myth of America as the new Garden of Eden in the eighteenth century, the cardinal Christian principle of love and the constitutional guarantees of unalienable human rights have been perverted on a grand scale by the children of God and the citizens of the American republic. And still we wait. Were, for example, the attacks on civil rights by the Reagan administration color blind? Was the veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990 by President Bush keeping faith with whites, blacks, or the egalitarian principle on which our nation was founded?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident," wrote the legendary father of our nation and the reputed father of several children by his slave mistress, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." If God, according to the Declaration of Independence, is the creator of natural and human rights, then man, according to our evolving constitutional democracy and the antislavery origins of the Civil War amendments, is the legislator and guarantor of these rights. The spirit and letter of civil rights in the United States thus derives its authority and power from the faith of its citizens in the principle of an egalitarian moral and social order established in the Declaration of Independence and the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
